Page Views Vs Engagement

This was originally posted in 2011.

With the proliferation of social networks and online market places, the importance of true email integration has become more apparent.

I’m not a very active user of Facebook, so excuse me if I’m late for noticing this, but I just saw that you can now respond from your email client to a message and that response will show up on the website. I understand this may not be the best decision from a pageview perspective but it makes the user experience much better and increases user engagement.

I’ve also noticed that newer sites usually don’t implement this feature initially. They make you log into the site and use their faux email interface. I’m not sure how much of this is due to the lack of development cycles vs the desire for more page views, but either way it needs to change eventually. The truth is that most people manage their email communication from their email client and that’s not going to change dramatically anytime soon.

This is one of the features that we hope Mailgun can help developers implement faster and better. It easily allows developers to give each user of a site a mailbox and implement true email features on top of a real email infrastructure. It’s hard to change user behavior and they usually resent you for trying, so why bother?